


Lasting Damage

by sparxwrites



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: AU - Don't Starve, Hurt No Comfort, Insanity, Permanent Injury, Resurrection, Shadows - Freeform, Starvation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 20:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3147581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Say, friend," says Lying, and Kirin cringes, waiting for those words he's come to hate. "You don't look so good."</p><p>(A <i>Don't Starve</i> au, featuring Kirin as Wilson and Lying as Maxwell.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lasting Damage

**Author's Note:**

> i started playing don't starve a month or so ago, devoured every fic on ao3 for it - and then the stars aligned and kd and lying played don't starve on a livestream. i spent a solid couple of hours talking very enthusiastically at to sipserino, and then... this was born. whatever this is.
> 
> Look at [the beautiful thing](http://sipserino.tumblr.com/post/107611497019/i-blame-sparxflame-and-rythianity-i-doodled-this) that sipserino drew!
> 
>  **warnings** for injury, threats of violence, and vague horror-shadow-things.

"Say, friend," says Lying, and Kirin cringes, waiting for those words he's come to hate. "You don't look so good."

“I wonder why,” he mutters, tries to push himself upright – but there’s pain in the back of his head, wrenching pain down his left arm and side, and he collapses against the ground. Whatever happened Before is a grey fuzz in his head, but there’s blood and pain and sharpness hidden in the haze, and he decides he prefers it as a blurred memory. “Wouldn’t possibly be because I _died_ , would it?”

Lying smirks, crouching down to trace the dark smudges under Kirin's eyes and the line of a ropy, half-healed scar down his cheek. “A herd of beefalo?” they ask, derision thick in their voice, even as Kirin twists his head away from their fingers, recoiling. “Really? I’d have expected better from you by now.”

“Sorry to disappoint.” His left hand is still trembling, and he can't seem stop it, but at least the pain’s fading. It still takes a wrench of effort to pull himself into sitting position, though, a numb sort of tingling running from left shoulder to wrist. Somehow, the numbness is scarier than the pain.

Finally sat up, he ends up hunched over his shaking arm, panting – hating how drained such a simple motion has left him.

He doesn’t rise to Lying’s bait. Doesn’t talk about the vague memories he has of hunger so sharp it was like a knife in his stomach, driving him to distraction and twisting, _twisting_ every time he moved. Doesn’t talk about the shadows that started following him even in the day, about the eyes that watched him at night, about the way his vision turned shaky and blurry and his knees nearly buckled at every strange sound.

Doesn’t ask Lying if they’ve ever been starving and insane. If they’ve ever been pushed to the same point of desperation that they’ve pushed him to, over and over and _over_.

He tries not to remember the hazy point where near-certain death by beefalo in a hopeless attempt to get food started looking preferable to wandering, lost and hollow and mad, down endless paths. Instead, he clutches his shoulder and tries to remember how to breathe.

Lying watches with dispassionate eyes, careless and cruel, before delicately brushing off the tops of their spotless trousers and straightening up. “You should be,” they murmur, smiling too wide for their face and with teeth too pointed to belong to anything that doesn’t live off raw flesh. “I may not deign to intervene directly, most of the time, but I _could_ make an… exception, for a lippy little thing like you.”

Kirin sighs, carefully massaging his shoulder to try and ease the shaking and the worst of the pain, and resists the urge to point out the fact he’s over a foot taller than them. Reaching up to adjust the ever-present circlet of flowers on his head, he winces when dried, mouldering petals drop into his lap at the slightest touch. Useless.

He picks it off his head with fingers curled around the dried-brittle stems wound together and eyes the dead flowers sadly, before tossing it to one side. It rolls across the cracked earth of whatever new hellhole Lying’s seen fit to resurrect him in this time, before falling on its side, the last of the petals scattering in a puff of dust.

“Well,” says Lying, raising an eyebrow at the discarded flower crown. “This is where I leave you, again. You know how this little game goes by now, don’t you?” They smile and, before Kirin can react, reach out to him with shadow hands, tutting as he flinches away yet again. But their fingers find his shoulder, press into the spasming muscle there, grip and dig in even as Kirin tries to pull away.

Kirin flinches away from the grasping shadows with a wounded cry, gasping,  curling over his arm. He misses the shadow that crosses behind Lying’s eyes as they let go, the confusion that shutters over their face before being wiped away.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to go, they know. Death here means a clean slate, means injuries healed. But here Kirin is, clutching his damaged shoulder, with a hand that won’t stop shaking and an arm still non-functional from a Beefalo stampede.

Something’s changing in the world. Lying wants to know what – and, more importantly, they want to know _why._

“You’d better find something to eat before night comes,” they say thoughtfully, as dark hands reach out of the earth to curl around their ankles, their waist, their shoulders. Kirin snarls at them, all feral anger and rage despite his injury, and they can’t help but laugh as the hands wrap them in darkness and whispers, dragging them down, _down_...

Their laughter echoes over Kirin’s exhausted breathing long after the shadows eat them whole.


End file.
